Heretofore, many attempts have been made to design burst firing mechanisms for weapon systems. However, the primary disadvantage of these systems has been that these mechanisms have been unreliable in automatically determining, independent of the user, whether all rounds of each programmed burst have been fired. Thus, these prior art mechanisms would automatically cycle through to complete the programmed burst before a new burst cycle could be initiated. For example, if the second shot of a three shot burst misfired, the prior art mechanisms would complete the third shot of the cycle before a new three round burst could be initiated. This problem is even more pronounced if the weapon is magazine fed. Assume the ammunition is depleted before the final shot in a burst. The user inserts a new clip or magazine expecting to fire a complete three round burst. Instead, only the final shot in the existing burst cycle is fired. The user, anticipating a burst cycle target situation, therefore, with these prior art mechanisms cannot rely on the weapon to accomodate the burst target situation instantaneously and will waste ammunition by manually charging the weapon to cycle the weapon to the point of initiation of a new burst cycle.